Seeing Stars, Phonemic Awareness (2001) by Nanci Bell - NEW US $29.95
Showing posts with label child. Show all posts
Showing posts with label child. Show all posts
What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic Awareness is defined as the ability to identify, hear, and work with the smallest units of sound known as phonemes. It is NOT the same as phonological awareness, instead, it is a sub-category of phonological awareness. For example, phonemic awareness is narrow, and deals only with phonemes and manipulating the individual sounds of words - such as /c/, /a/, and /t/ are the individual sounds that makeup to form the word "cat". Phonological awareness, on the other hand, includes phonemic awareness ability, and it also includes the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate larger units of sound such as rimes and onsets.
Phonemic awareness can be taught very early on and will play a critical role in helping children learn to read and spell. While it's not set in stone on when a child can learn to read, however, I do believe that a child that can speak is a child that can learn to read. Children as young as two years old can learn to read by developing phonemic awareness, and they can learn to read fluently. Please see a video of a 2-year old (2yr11months) reading below.
Below are several of the most common phonemic awareness skills that are often practiced with students and young children:
- Phonemic identity - being able to recognize common sounds in different words such as /p/ is the common sound for "pat", "pick", and "play".
- Phonemic isolation - being able to recognize the individual sounds of words such as /c/ is the beginning sound of "cat" and /t/ is the ending sound of "cat".
- Phoneme substitution - being able to change one word to another by substituting one phoneme. For example changing the /t/ in "cat" to /p/ now makes "cap".
- Word Segmenting - the parent says the word "lap", and the child says the individual sounds: /l/, /a/, and /p/.
- Oral blending - the parent says the individual sounds such as /r/, /e/, and /d/, and the child forms the word from the sounds to say "red".
READ: How to Teach Phonics and Reading
Studies have found that phonemic awareness is the best predictor of reading success in young children. Research has also found that children with a high level of phonemic awareness progress with high reading and spelling achievements; however, some children with low phonemic awareness experience difficulties in learning to read and spell. Therefore, it is important for parents to help their young children develop good phonemic awareness.
Being able to oral blend and segment words helps children to read and spell. According to the National Reading Panel, oral blending helps children develop reading skills where printed letters are turned into sounds which combine to form words. Additionally, word segmenting helps children breakdown words into their individual sounds (phonemes), and helps children learn to spell unfamiliar words.
As a young child begins to develop and master phonemic awareness skills, they will discover an entirely new world in print and reading. You will open up their world to a whole new dimension of fun and silliness. They will be able to read books that they enjoy, develop a better understanding of the world around them through printed materials, and have a whole lot of fun by making up new nonsense words through phonemic substitutions.
For example, we taught our daughter to read at a young age - when she was a little over 2 and a half years old. Before she turned three, she would run around the house saying all types of silly words using phonemic substitution. One of her favorites was substituting the letter sound /d/ in "daddy" with the letter sound /n/. So, she would run around me in circles and repeatedly say "nanny, nanny, come do this" or "nanny, nanny, come play with me" etc... Of course, she only did this when she wanted to be silly and to make me laugh, at other times, she would of course properly refer to me as "daddy", and not "nanny". She is well aware of the differences between these words and is fully capable of using phonemic substitution to change any of the letters in the words to make other words.
Phonemic Awareness
How to Teach Phonemic Awareness While Reading Bedtime Stories
Most people know about phonics, and what it is; however, far fewer people know what phonemic awareness is. In short, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and work with the phonemes. For example, /d/, /o/, and /g/, are the individual sounds of the word "dog". Please note, the letters enclosed in the slashes denote the sound of the letter and not the name of the letter. Phonemes are the smallest units of individual sounds that form a word.
Bedtime Stories
Phonemic awareness is not something you're born with, and it is an ability that's gained through repeated exposure to listening, speaking, and reading. As parents, there are many different strategies you can use to help your children develop phonemic awareness such as playing simple word segmentation or oral blending games.
READ: How to Teach Your Baby to Read
Like most parents, we (my wife and I) read bedtime stories before we put our children to sleep, and one of the best strategies that we like to use to teach phonemic awareness to our children is to mix in word segmenting and oral blending when we read bedtime stories for our kids. This is an exceptional method because it doesn't take any extra time or effort, since reading bedtime stories is something you already do. So, here's how to go about it.
Let's say that you're reading a nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill":
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
Instead of reading each word straight through the rhyme, you can randomly mix in oral blending on various words in the rhyme. Please note: instead of using slashes "/" to denote phonemes, we'll simply use hyphens to make it easier to read. So, let's assume that your child is very young, perhaps 2, 3, or 4 years old, and you want to start helping them develop some phonemic awareness. You can read Jack and Jill like so:
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J-ack fell down and broke his crownAnd J-ill came tumbling after.
As you can see, when you read the rhyme, you simply make an effort to separate several of the first letters sounds from the words, such as /J/ from "ack", and /J/ from "ill". As your child begins to grasp the concept of individual sounds making up words, you can slowly increase the difficulty by breaking down each word further. For example:
Jack
J-ack
J-a-ck
Repeated exposure of this type of word segmenting and oral blending will slowly help your child develop a sense and an understanding that each word is made up of individual sounds - in other words, you are teaching phonemic awareness to your children during bedtime stories without them even knowing that they are being taught to!
Teach Your Baby to Read
Photo by Mark Zamora on Unsplash
How to Teach Your Baby to Read
Teach Your Child To Read With Movement, Fun & Games: By Sharon Stansfield US $86.67
Teaching your baby to read is becoming a more and more high priority for parents now as it becomes clear that learning to read at a young age offers numerous advantages for the child once he or she begins school. Studies have consistently found that teaching a baby to read and helping children develop phonemic awareness well before entering school can significantly improve their development in reading and spelling. However, when it comes to teaching babies to read, there are two main teaching methods.
These two main methods of teaching a baby or child to read are the whole language method, and the phonics and phonemic awareness method (the phonetic approach), which should be the preferred teaching method in helping children learn to read. Some prefer the whole language method, while others use the phonics approach, and there is also an educator that uses a mix of different approaches. With the Look-say approach of whole language learning, a child begins with memorizing sight words and then taught various strategies of figuring out the text from various clues.
The whole language method produces inaccurate and poor readers compared to students of the phonetic approach. Using the whole word approach, English is being taught as an ideographic language such as Chinese. One of the biggest arguments from whole-language advocates is that teaching a baby to read using phonics breaks up the words into letters and syllables, which have no actual meaning, yet they fail to acknowledge the fact that once the child is able to decode the word, they are able to actually READ that entire word, pronounce it, and understand its meaning. So in practicality, it's a very weak argument. English is an alphabetic system, and unlike Chinese, it is not an ideograph like Chinese characters, and should not be taught using an ideographic approach.
READ: How to Teach Phonemic Awareness While Reading Bedtime Stories
I always say that if your baby can speak, then you can begin to teach your baby to read. I won't mention any names here, but I think most parents are probably aware of one very popular "reading" program, which is a whole word approach. Using this method, your baby simply learns to memorize the words without actually reading the words. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that teaching your baby to read using the whole word approach is an effective method. In fact, there are large numbers of studies that have consistently stated that teaching children to read using phonemic awareness is a highly effective method.
Teaching phonemic awareness to children significantly improves their reading more than instruction that lacks any attention to phonemic awareness. - statement made by the National Reading Panel
I do think that the debate on the effectiveness of teaching a baby to read using either the whole language or phonics method is settled by the statements made by the National Reading Panel. They reviewed over 1,960 different studies to make their conclusions.
Teach Your Baby to Read
In fact, while my wife was pregnant with our first child, I began doing extensive research on the subject on how to teach my baby to read - after birth, of course. Like most parents, I also came across the popular whole word teaching approach being heavily marketed. Seeing the infomercials got me quite excited actually, seeing the babies on TV "reading". But after trying it out, it occurred to me that our baby wasn't actually "reading", but actually "memorizing", and I thought to myself, how are my children supposed to read newer, and more complicated words as they grow older without an appropriate method of decoding those words? This is where my long and extensive research into phonics and phonemic awareness began.
Learn to read childrens books
After many hours of research and learning as much as I could, I felt comfortable enough with our simple phonemic awareness teaching method, that my wife and I began giving brief 3 to 5-minute lessons to our daughter, aged 2 years and 8 months. Within just a few short weeks, her reading ability (and I mean actual reading ability, not memorization) was astounding, even for me as the parent who gave the reading instructions. Friends and family alike were simply flabbergasted at what our daughter was capable of reading at just 2 years and 11 months. Please watch the video above, composed of clips of her reading randomly created sentences for reading fun.
I simply can't imagine this kind of progress possible with the whole word approach - just think of the tens and hundreds of words a young child would have to memorize!
Phonemic Awareness Book
Our son is fast approaching the age where he will soon be able to speak, and we will be using the same simple step-by-step method to teach him to read. If you'd like to learn more about our simple, effective, step-by-step program, please signup for our newsletter below. We also send out new articles, updates, tips, and guides on teaching a baby to read.
Phonemic Awareness
How to Teach Phonics and Reading
Teaching children to read by teaching phonics activities is a lot like doing math, where you have to know what the numbers are, how to count, and you need to learn to add and subtract before learning to multiply and divide. Teaching phonics to children is no different where you follow a step-by-step approach by first teaching the child the alphabet letters and phonics sounds, and then teaching them the combination of different letters to create different words, and using words to form sentences. It is a very logical and sequential buildup of phonics knowledge and reading ability.
Before a child can learn to read, he or she must first learn the alphabet letters and know the sounds represented by the letters. It's usually easier to teach some consonants and short vowels first before moving on to more complicated things such as consonant digraphs (2 consonants formed to produce one sound, such as "ch" or "ph") and long vowels. As you can see, teaching children to read by the phonics method helps them develop phonemic awareness, and it is also a very logical and straight forward approach.
Start off by teaching your child the phonics sounds. You can choose to teach your child in alphabetic order going from A to Z, or you can teach several commonly used consonant sounds and vowels, and go from there. For example, you may start teaching your child /a/, /c/, and /t/ (slashes denote the sound of the letters). Once your child has learned to quickly recognize these letters and properly sound out their sounds, you can then teach them to blend /c/, /a/, /t/ to make the words "cat", or "tac", or "at".
As you introduce more letters and phonics sounds in your lesson plans, you can generate more words, and slowly introduce short, simple sentences to your reading lessons. Depending on the age of your child, I would suggest keeping the phonics lessons relatively short - around 5 to 10 minutes. Sometimes, just 3 to 5 minutes for a short lesson is plenty, and you can easily teach these short phonics lessons 2 or 3 times each day for a total of 10 to 15 minutes. Young children tend to be forgetful, so repetition is very important.
You don't want to make the lessons too long and boring, that the child begins to feel like doing a "chore" when learning to read. So keep it short, fun, and interesting. By keeping the phonics lessons short, you also avoid overwhelming the child with too much information and always remember to make sure your child has mastered one lesson before moving on to new material. Confusion and uncertainty will only make their learning effort difficult and frustrating - so review often, move on to new material only after they've mastered the current lessons.
READ: What is Phonemic Awareness?
So when can you start teaching phonics sounds and lessons to children? Not everyone will agree with me on this, but I believe that if your child can speak, then your child can learn to read. Of course, every child is different and unique, and some children will be more receptive to learning reading than others. One thing for certain, is that the earlier a child learns to read, the better.
We have taught our 2-year-old daughter to read through teaching phonics sounds and lessons, and helping her develop phonemic awareness. If you watched the video above, that is our daughter reading randomly created sentences. We simply started teaching phonics sounds to her by spending 5 to 10 minutes each day, spread between 2 to 3 separate lessons, and slowly introduced new letters and reading material.
If you would like to learn more about the simple, effective, step-by-step method of teaching phonics and phonemic awareness, please click below.
Phonemic Awareness Book
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